Mr Robot

Verily, we live in a golden age of television. My Freeview box runneth over with dramas being recorded, to be consumed from a nearby sofa unhealthily soon and close together: currently Homeland, River, The Last Kingdom, Fargo, The Returned. More to follow, I have no doubt. Meanwhile there is Amazon Prime and the brave new world of streamed series available through online retailers (I haven't dared subscribe to Netflix: probably I would give up reading altogether). Here I can report mixed results: I gave up on Hand of God after a few episodes, probably on the grounds of the sheer unpleasantness of the leading duo, the mad judge - brilliantly played by Ron Perlman, mark you - and his psycho sidekick, a pairing without the charm of Walter White and Jesse, who must have been in the mind of the production team. The Man in the High Castle scored higher on whatever undemanding barometer I was using and I look forward to the full season in November. Yesterday I tried out episode one of Black Sails, terrific stuff probably aimed at viewers less than half my age. I shall be surrendering to its frantic plot-driven charms in due course.

But my latest binge has been the hackers-take-on-the-corporate-beast saga Mr Robot. This took me back to one of the first TV series to grip me, The Changes, based on the trilogy of novels by Peter Dickinson. I used to come home from school avid to see this drama in which a collective lunacy leads to the smashing of machines and the pursuit of the technologically literate as witches. Years on, nervousness about our own Frankenstein creations grows: witness Humans, the Channel 4 series in which robots, or 'synths', produced as domestic helps, start to exhibit traits which makes them indistinguishable from their human masters (in other words, the only story you can ever really have in a drama about robots). In Mr Robot, post-2008, post-Snowden, post-Ashley Madison, machines are both enemy and friend. Enemy, when they take the form of massive databases storing  personal information and the world's debt; friends, when they are laptops used by brilliant hackers to bring down the beast.

Mr Robot is the story of Eliot (Elliott?), IT worker by day in a computer security company, and hacker by night, obsessively driven to hack into anything that takes his interest, but using his powers to do good, nailing the runners of a paedophile network, for example, in the illustrative opening scene. The story leads him into battle with the dragon E Corp, which actually calls itself in some kind of postmodern metafictional irony, Evil Corp. Eliot runs into a group of hackers who are bent on deleting all records of debt (think, though: your money is itself a debt that the bank owes you; your current account is from the bank's point of view a liability) and thus freeing the world from the grip of neoliberal capitalism. In another irony, this idea is itself a debt to Fight Club, a detail much noted by Amazon reviewers. In fact, Mr Robot is full of this kind of intertextual reference and in a long line of enquiry about the collapsing categories of virtual and real (Borges saw it all coming in Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius). Mr Robot himself is the architect of this ambitious scheme, and it is suggested pretty early on that he may be a product of Eliot's imagination.

About halfway through, the plot of Mr Robot loses direction and it becomes instead a trawl through Eliot's inner demons. It goes inwards just when it needs to go outward and explore the actual world a bit more. There are other annoyances: Eliot himself fits too neatly into the caricature of the brilliant IT nerd, and the team of hackers are similarly the usual gang of the variously disenchanted, airlifted in from some eighties movie by the looks of it and strangely undisturbed in their work by the attentions of the NSA. Their brandname of fsociety is distressingly juvenile. Sympathy for Eliot largely evaporated in my case when, as part of some daring break-in scheme, he has to behave in an absolutely foul manner to a blameless employee who is only being friendly. A psychotic executive is brought in to spice things up in a sub-plot that is hard to follow. The end, as we must expect in these cases, is a submission for a second season.

Still, many good things too. Excellent performances all round. One thing I notice in series these days is a much more sophisticated use of music and sound design to build atmospheres. This was part of the shocking and moving effect of a scene involving a car and a prison. for a while I thought it was all too binary, good little guys in denim pitched against the men in suits. But then I realised that the series is smart enough to see flaws in the Great Hacking Scheme, too: namely, once you have toppled the Capitalist Monster what are you going to put in its place? (In the final scenes, I wondered where all the plebs and execs partying actually got their money from). There are two brilliant passages of rapid condensed media studies discourse on the world as we experience it being essentially fake, a mind control system created by big business for its own ends. Lyotard, Chomsky ... eventually, ideas from anywhere get packaged as entertainment. And finally there is the irony of seeing an anti-corporate drama commissioned and streamed by the corporate giant Amazon (A Corp?) for our own entertainment, pushing away the real world for a while with a commercial fiction.  Illusion upon illusion. I watched this series the same week that Talktalk were humbled by a hack, first ascribed to some jihadist group but now, we are told, allegedly conducted by  game-obsessed teenagers. Perhaps Dickinson's luddites were right all along. Off to the garden shed to find a mallet. Down with machines and their sinister codes, and back to a life of honest toil in the fields of Old England.

Strange Arrangements, Drifters

A sailor is washed up on – we suppose – a desert island, and tries to find his way around with the help of an instrument of some kind. Its glimmering red and blue lights are the first thing we see. He meets another castaway and, soon afterwards, another. It appears the sailor’s new companions have whiled away their time on the island by taking refuge in their imagination, and he soon joins them for a fantasy voyage on a raft made up of planks and poles. Over the hour that Drifters lasts, this fantasy world morphs and shifts; puppet characters appear, chests divulge strange contents, and there is a spectacular sea sequence involving huge rolls of tarpaulin (or something like it) which for a remarkable moment rolls up into something like two giant ocean creatures who dance a curious duet. A darker final sequence hints pretty broadly that this is no ordinary island but some kind of Dantean circle, Davey Jones’s locker, an undersea ghost world whose inmates must live on fantasy alone.

Drifters is quite a feast for the senses, with atmospheric use of lighting and ambient sound. It speaks, too, of the essence of theatre, where a paper bag can become a living thing, and the debris of the sea can transform itself, with a little imagination, into a forest, a cavern, a ship, a home. Drifters was a good lesson in how theatre does not need to imitate the realism of film and television. On stage, you can achieve more by going in the other direction, using the crafts of mime, puppetry and evocative movement to create with the audience's participation an alternative world. It was a fine masterclass in these arts. I would, though, have liked some kind of plot. I felt I was seeing a sequence of well-though-out routines created, presumably, through improvisation in the studio. But without some kind of narrative arc, bringing its own drama of twists and turns, it was difficult for the show to gather momentum or make us care greatly for the characters. Story really is a wonderful and important thing, and putting it to one side creates a challenge for performers and audience alike. As a celebration of the imagination through theatrical means, though, Drifters undoubtedly succeeds; and I shall certainly be looking out for the next production by Winchester-based company Strange Arrangements.

John Plender, Capitalism

The capitalist system, which we live and breathe, rests on a remarkable logic: a group of selfish individuals, each one seeking  private happiness, produces a society where the greatest possible number get what they want – or something like it. Through the magic of the free market, Adam Smith’s too-oft-quoted ‘invisible hand’, selfishness actually produces its opposite, a functioning and prosperous society broadly advantageous to its members. Private acquisition agglomerates into public good; from competition comes community; greed spawns gregariousness, or at any rate its mercantile analogue. This central paradox, which has its origin in utilitarianism’s pursuit of the maximization of pleasure across society, is quite dizzying when you think about it. How can the pursuit of A, by the alchemy of the market, produce not-A? Yet this system, based on the private pursuit of capital and so known as capitalism, has achieved remarkable things. Over two centuries or so, it has raised the living standards of most of the world and dramatically reduced global poverty. The technology, medicine, comforts and luxuries many of us take for granted today would have seemed a miracle even a generation ago.  No other economic system is available as a credible alternative: feudalism has disappeared into history, leaving only a quaint residue such as the peerage system and the royal family; communist central planning collapsed dramatically (economically speaking: central planning in other areas, such as education, is pursued ardently across the bureaucratised West). Other than capitalism, what economic system is going to bring, say, a Bangladeshi or a Somalian the standard of living I enjoy – running water, hygiene, education, all the rest of it? If you agree that they are as entitled to these things as I am  (and what rational basis could there be for disagreement on this point?) what is there to do but to espouse the market as the most likely source of this development? Capitalism has triumphed over its rivals and has a long list of achievements to its credit.

Yet gung-ho, Gordon Gecko ‘Greed is Good’ celebrations of capitalism are rare these days; and Capitalism is presently assailed by many critics, from many shades of the political spectrum (only a very selective observer could say they are all ‘left wing’). For one thing, the fact that it is posited on human selfishness makes it ethically dubious, whatever the alleged long-term beneficial consequences of this greed may be. Moral intuition and religious systems alike persuade us that avarice is a vice, corrupting of the self and damaging to others. And the model of a rational consumer going into a free market , and thereby helping it to function efficiently for the good of the majority, exposes itself to critique at every point: are we really rational consumers? Do we not desire and buy things on a whim, yielding to the tide of fashion, or sometimes - perhaps regularly - in an act of madness?  And what does it do to us psychologically, ethically, to think of ourselves as essentially ‘consumers’ anyway? To make us into non-stop consumers, a massive advertising industry is necessary, playing on every conceivable fear, anxiety and fantasy to make us think that buying stuff will make us happy. And to make all that stuff that we are duped into thinking we need, the planet is steadily raided for its resources, polluted and spoiled. We are consuming the earth we live off; and if that sounds eco-hippy, then capitalism’s purchase of the channels of information in education and the media has been a success. And how free, we may then ask, is the alleged ‘free’ market, where government intervention and policy massively influences trade and production, favouring some in the market at the cost of others? How can we call it efficient, we may persist,  when it is so obviously inherently unstable, with a rollercoaster of booms, busts, frenzies, and recessions? And rather than the greatest good of the greatest number flowing from this market - a market so intrusive and ubiquitous we now carry it around with us on our phones - we see instead ever-widening gaps between the haves and the have-nots as goods are unevenly distributed, partly because the governments that might do something to distribute wealth more equitably are themselves owned by the rich who want to keep their treasure hoard to themselves. Consumerism, materialism, waste and pollution, injustice and inequality, the destruction of the planet and the trivialisation of the human spirit. Capitalism’s defenders face too many sane and sagacious critics to be blandly complacent.

John Plender, thankfully, is anything but complacent, and interested in serious debate. Capitalism leads us through the subject with great dexterity. As a writer for The Financial Times and a member of various financial groups and forums, Plender is what one might think of as a member of the establishment. Yet far from the closed-mindedness  one associates with this rather fictitious group, Plender shows common ground with many anti-establishment critics. He does not believe the mess of 2007-08 has been anywhere near cleared up through improvements in analysis, assumptions and regulation – indeed, he fears another and bigger crash is on the cards. He points out inequitable wage differentials, and notes the waste of human resources as the talented young are drawn into the financial sector and away from productive parts of the economy; and his brilliantly lucid analysis of the Eurozone crisis is pretty severe at the behaviour of the northern countries towards the south. In an interesting chapter on the art market, the author clearly feels commodification, the equation of financial value with other kinds of value, has to stop somewhere. Capitalism is not a defence of the status quo and makes clear that capitalism needs to get its house in much better order if further gains are to be delivered and catastrophe avoided. Like Erasmus on the Catholic Church, Plender believes the system needs to reform from within, not be dismantled and replaced with an unclear substitute.

An attractive feature of the book is the use of literary sources to investigate topics. It is refreshingly historically grounded. So we have passages of Defoe and Addison on the London Exchange, Goethe’s Faust as a commentary on externalities and social dysfunction, and apposite quotations from Dickens, de Tocqueville and many others besides. The author is open to the ideas of many different kinds of economist, too. Like Ha-Joon Chang, Plender thinks it is a pity that many economists today take the Chicago school as a comprehensive explanatory model and ignore other perspectives. Certainly some young students of economics I meet come across as acolytes of a faith rather than serious analysts of events. How satisfying it is to find here a range of writers being drawn on and engaged with: across pages 282-4, for example, we come across Marx, Keynes, Friedman and Raghuram Rajan in a discussion of public debt. Capitalism might perhaps have said something more about the psychology induced by capitalist ideology; and somewhat surprisingly there is no chapter specifically about environmental damage, which the author himself mentions as one of the greatest challenges to be faced. This is also not the book to read it you want to find out what ‘derivative’ or ‘futures market' means, since the author has to take some things for granted just to get going (that said, some terms are defined deftly along the way). However, no one book on this huge subject can do everything and the topics covered by these chapters, from the nature of money itself to debt, speculation, banking and gold are described with style and insight. I learned a lot from Capitalism and would certainly recommend it as a guide to a subject, and debate, which is far too important to be left to economists, establishment or otherwise.

The Glass Menagerie

We greatly enjoyed The Glass Menagerie at the Nuffield, the first show to be directed by Sam Hodges since he took over as Director there in 2013. Tennessee Williams's 1944 play is strongly autobiographical: would-be writer Tom Wingfield (TW, note) longs to escape from a home in which everyone is in flight from reality: his mother, a suffocating, domineering southerner abandoned by her husband and taking resort in fantasy and nostalgia; his sister Laura, who has dropped out of school and business college and occupies herself going for walks, playing phonograph records and looking after her collection of glass animals, her 'glass menagerie'; and Tom himself, precariously employed in a shoe warehouse where he is known as 'Shakespeare' for his dreamy hobby of writing. The summit of this heartbreak household's ambitions is a 'gentleman caller' who will fall for Laura and spirit her away. The play leads up to this great event and its repercussions for the family. Does it end happily ever after? Remember, this is Tennessee Williams we are talking about here.

There was a strong design element to the production, credited to someone evidently so eminent that he is known simply as Ultz. The stage, framed by moving boards, resembled a film screen, picking up on Tom's escapist obsession with going to the movies. Tom himself spent most of the time either in front of the stage or in the audience, leading us through his 'memory play' as it played before us. Subdued colours and dim lighting produced a monochrome effect suggesting memory haze and early film. There were captions, slides and live streaming of Tom himself, and a set of metal steps for the fire escape from the family's apartment, also representing the escape route for Tom and a kind of bridge between past and present. Lighting and sound were used to tremendous atmospheric effect, and there were some ravishingly beautiful moments with candles, windblown curtains and the glowing glass unicorn.


There's always a danger that such directorial and designer cleverness overwhelms the play, or suggests a lack of confidence in it - as I think happened in Lyndsey Turner's Hamlet - but here the ideas were thought through and brought out Williams's poetic vision without distracting from it. Acting throughout was terrific. Dannie Lee Wynter played Tom with a caustic confidence, gradually revealing his character's insecurities and tragic inadequacy as family provider. Belinda Lang portrayed his mother Amanda with great understanding, showing a character who is at the same time insufferable yet understandable in her anxieties. The scene between Laura (Pearl Chanda) and her gentleman caller Mr O'Connor (Wilf Scolding) was totally compelling, touching and finally devastating. All in all, a remarkable piece of ensemble acting and a bold, committed production. The Nuffield moves towards Christmas fare now, but I'm very glad we caught this, and thankful I listened to two people who recommended it. Why some people in Winchester think you have to go to London to see good theatre is a mystery which passes understanding.